IT Service Management

Mike Greene Mike Bohmbach Daniel Paulus

Are you ready?

How many people are interested in a future career in some type of management? How many people have a background in IT Service Management?

Scenario
Your CIO orders your boss to a meeting and your boss decides to send you! A great opportunity for your career, but also a possible set back if you are unprepared. The topic of the meeting is IT service management.and you dont know a thing!

What is ITSM?
ITSM is a set of guidelines for different aspects of best-practice data management. Split into two groups and eleven disciplines. The two groups inside of ITSM are Service Delivery and Service Support.

What you will leave with today

ITSM is aimed at the strategic level of a corporation, not the ground floor. By understanding its main concepts, you will gain competitive advantage over others and be better prepared for a future in management. ITSM is used in all companies to some degree, you can use it to improve the practice in your workplace.

Overview
Service Delivery

IT Financial Management Capacity Management Availability Management IT Continuity Management Service Level Management
Change Management Release Management Problem Management Incident Management Configuration Management Service Desk

Service Support

ITSM Service Delivery

Service Level Management

Provides a way to align the IT services with the business requirements. Customers and IT personnel can discuss and asses how well a service is being delivered. Primary Objective:
Provide a way for setting clear expectations with both customers and user groups

Service Level Management

The primary management of IT services Service Level Management is dependent upon all the other areas of service delivery Business processes associated with SLM:
Reviewing existing services Negotiating with the customers Implementation of Service Improvement policies and processes Planning for service growth Involvement in accounting to asses costs of services

Financial Management
Financial Management includes budgeting, accounting, and charging for IT services being delivered to the customers. Budgeting and accounting involves understanding the costs of providing various services Financial Management ensures that any IT service proposed is justified from a budget point of view. Allows IT departments to function as a business unit. Allows customers to demand a value for their money.

Financial Management
The discipline of ensuring the IT infrastructure is obtained at the most effective price
Not necessarily the cheapest!

Calculating the costs of providing the service so the organization can justify the costs of its IT services
Costs can then be recovered from the customer of the service

IT Costs can be divided into different units:

Equipment Software Organization (staff, overtime, etc.) Transfer (costs of 3rd party service providers)

Costs can also be divided into direct and indirect costs, and can be capital costs or ongoing costs.

Availability Management
Main goal is to ensure the IT services are available to users when they need them. Availability is usually calculated and reported as a percentage of the agreed service hours for which the service was available.

Availability Management
Measuring availability:
Agreement statistics what is included within the agreed service Availability agreed service times, response times Help Desk Calls number of incidents raised, response times, resolution times Capacity performance timings for online transactions, report production, numbers of users, etc. Costing Details charges for the service, and any penalties should service levels not be met.

Availability Management
Calculating availability:
Serviceability when a service is provided by a 3rd party, this is the expected availability of those components Reliability how long a component can be expected to perform under certain conditions without failing Recoverability how long it should take to restore a component back to its normal state after a failure Maintainability how easy a component can be maintained, which can be both corrective or preventative Resilience the ability to withstand failure Security the ability of components to withstand breaches of security

Capacity Management
Includes planning, sizing, and controlling service solution capacity to satisfy user demands. This requires a collection of information about usage scenarios and patterns as well as stated performance requirements.

Capacity Management
Inputs:
Performance monitoring Workload monitoring Application sizing Resource forecasting Demand forecasting Modeling

IT Service Continuity Management

Also known as contingency management
Focuses on minimizing the disruptions to businesses caused by failure of mission-critical systems Deals with planning to cope with and recover from an IT disaster Provides guidance on safeguarding existing systems Also considers what activities need to be taken in the event certain services are not available

IT Service Continuity Management

Basic steps:
Prioritizing the businesses to be recovered by conducting a Business Impact Analysis (BIA) Performing a Risk Assessment (Risk Analysis) for each of the IT Services to identify the assets, threats, vulnerabilities and countermeasures for each service. Evaluating the options for recovery Producing the Contingency/Recovery Plan Testing, reviewing, and revising the plan on a regular basis

IT Service Continuity Management

Continuity management and disaster recovery are important, yet often overlooked, part of IT security and risk analysis Inadequate contingency planning is looked at as a risk to the business, and is often overlooked until it is too late.
When a security or other breach results in the loss of supporting IT systems or valuable information

Part 2: ITSM Service Support

Service Support Service Desk

Service Support revolves largely around a strong service or help desk. Service desks can be unskilled (used for incident tracking and call dispatching) or skilled (incidents are solved at the helpdesk). Goal:
Provide a single point of contact for the user for all their IT queries. Proactively identify problems as well as create resolutions to incidents.

Service Support Service Desk

Path:
Customer needs and business needs are understood. The service desk is an integral part of any organization, an effective service desk with strong communication can lower costs throughout the organization. The #1 call received by a helpdesk is to help reset/restore a password Provide alternate means to reset passwords, and other common helpdesk functions. Answer the questions of:
What permissions should the helpdesk receive? What levels of expertise should the helpdesk have, and how can we train them in our organization? How can we manage our lines of communication, and what happens when incidents become problems?
http://www.itil.org.uk/sm-activites.htm

Service Support Incident and Problem Management

Incident: Any event which is not part of the standard operation of a service and which causes, or may cause, an interruption to the quality of that service. Problem: A problem is the result of multiple incidents that results in a RFC or Known Error instead of a fix. Goals:
Restore systems as quickly as possible with minimal impact to the business. Ensure that the integrity, confidentiality, and availability of IT services are maximized throughout the organization.

Incident Management Cont.

Path:
How do we reduce incidents and keep the organization aware of known errors? How can we resolve RFCs as quickly as possible? Trend analysis, incident classification, and a healthy flow of information are all needed for good management.

Service Support Change Management

If Change Management procedures are not effective, this may result in unauthorized changes to IT Services, which could have major impacts on the business even collapse of the business that the IT Services are there to support. Goal
Ensure that standardized methods and procedures are used for handling of changes. Sarbanes-Oxley makes this more important than ever!

Path:
RFCs should go through multiple checks and must pass some final decision making point, CAB or manager. All RFCs should be subjected to a routine scrutiny. Good project management

Service Support Release Management

Release Management is responsible for the management of software support, development, and installation. Goal:
Plan the rollout of software. Implement procedures for the distribution of changes to the IT system.

Path:
Proper Release Management means to organize a way of controlling and monitoring distribution of software, often by creating a single point of storage for all software. For internal software this also means creating a logical store to track releases, and store previous versions of software. Create a standardized process for implementing software.

Service Support Configuration Management

Configuration Management is a process that tracks all of the individual items in a system. A system may be a single server, or an entire IT department. Goals:
Create a list of every hardware and software item in the system and define their relationship while tracking their current status as well as their history.

Service Support Configuration Management cont

Path:
Implementation of asset or configuration tracking tools such as SMS or Centurion Mangement. There are five basic activities involved in Configuration Management:
Planning Handles the short term (three to six month) plan facing the IT department, and the changes that are to be expected. Identification This is the specification, identification of all IT components and their inclusion in the database. Control Make sure effective Change Management is in place Status Keeping the history of each item, as well as making sure that the current status of the item is up to date throughout its lifecycle. Verification Verification that the Item physically exists.

Review

Service Delivery
IT Financial Management Capacity Management Availability Management IT Continuity Management Service Level Management

Service Support
Change Management Release Management Problem Management Incident Management Configuration Management Service Desk

Things to remember
ITSM is the use of in-depth management techniques used to add value to IT! Many companies miss this added value by not capitalizing on ITSM. IT is a manageable business! Not just a bunch of computer geeks writing code! View your career with this framework and you will be more prepared when you end up in a management level meeting!

Questions Dr. Hilton?